Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Introducing a new default pricing equation

At the time of the
Bitfinex hack last Tuesday the default price equation in use for
LocalBitcoins advertisements was taking pricing data from Bitfinex. When
trading was stopped on Bitfinex, advertisements using the default price
equation on LocalBitcoins stopped working. We have since disabled all
advertisements that use Bitfinex in the price equation to make sure
there are no advertisements active with the wrong price.

A new default

To
replace the old default price equation, bitfinexusd, we introduced a
new pricing source called btc_in_usd. Instead of relying on pricing
information from one source, this equation takes pricing information
from 7 different sources and calculates a median price which is used.
This makes it much more resiliant for situations where the price source
gives incorrect, erroneous data or stops working entirely.

Many
of you rely on the default price equation with your advertisements, with
this new change we want to make sure it's as reliable as possible.